There is no doubt that music plays an important role in many people’s lives, but have you ever thought about what your taste in music says about you? — according to new research, for example, much more than you might initially think. Of course, whether you listen to Taylor Swift or not doesn’t make someone a good or bad person, but previous research has already shown that music can affect our emotions, cognitive performance, creativity, and mental flexibility — and that’s not all.
Evaluating our favorite songs and artists can give us insight into our level of empathy, our personal needs, and help us express our values. However, despite the fact that we know these connections, we pay much less attention to what kind of connection there might be between our musical taste and our moral values. Among other things, this inspired researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, who undertook to investigate the complex interplay between music and morality.
Our study provides compelling evidence that music preferences can serve as a window into an individual’s moral values.
– editing doctor. Charalambos Saitis, one of the lead authors of the study, is an associate professor of digital music processing at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.
The study looked at existing data from 1,480 participants that had been previously collected using the LikeYouth survey tool. Participants were asked to fill out psychometric questionnaires about their moral values and then look at which artists the participants liked on Facebook. The authors’ assumption was that if a user liked a particular artist’s Facebook page, that artist’s most popular songs would reflect the user’s musical preferences.
The team then began analyzing the top five songs of each participant’s favorite artists based on their vocal and lyrical characteristics.
The researchers then used machine learning algorithms to analyze the characteristics and predict the moral values of the participants. For the work, moral values are formulated through Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), a social psychological theory that aims to explain the origins and diversity of human moral reasoning based on innate, normative foundations. It was first proposed by psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, based on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. The theory suggests six foundations, which are as follows:
- Care/damage
- Justice/Fraud
- Loyalty/betrayal
- Power/subversion
- Sanctity/degradation
- Freedom/repression
This was followed by analysis of the narrative, moral values, sentiment and emotional charge of the words, for which the team used lexicon-based methods and Bidirectional Encoding Representations from Embedding Transformers (BERT)-based methods. In addition, Spotify’s API also helped them, as the platform offers an almost infinite number of audio features. Finally the results showed
That musical taste can provide a more accurate definition of a person’s moral compass than the general demographic data available to date.
Interestingly, pitch and timbre can primarily help assess the values of care/harm and justice/deception, while the emotions expressed in words can help assess loyalty/betrayal and power/subversion.
Our findings show that music is not just a source of entertainment or aesthetic pleasure; It is also a powerful way to reflect and shape our moral sensibilities. If we understand this relationship, we can open new horizons for music-based interventions that promote positive moral development.
explained Vjosa Brennicki, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at Queen Mary University. The study is complete By clicking here You can read it.
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